The Horses of the Night

by Michael Cadnum

  Now he looked into the shadows around us, a fire just beginning its dance in the fireplace. I could think only one thing: He was no longer my friend.

  I decided to be direct. “What happened to you?”

  “You mean: to my money.”

  “What happened?”

  “Bad judgment. Bad luck. Worse advice. This façade of ease, this role I play, is not cheap. You know all about that.”

  I knew.

  Even in the muted lighting of the club, quiet drinkers and distant white-coated waiters all hushed, nearly silent, Blake was only a copy of himself, a reproduction with new lines around the eyes, and a hard glance.

  “I don’t expect you to forgive me,” he said. “DeVere left me no choice.”

  Perhaps Blake had always been like this, and I was just now able to see him as he was. It was a painful thought. “You remember my fiancée? Nona Lyle?”

  “How could I forget such a charming person. She’s a psychiatrist,” he said. “A delightful woman. You think I need her professional services?”

  “Not at all. I want you to see the sort of work she does.”

  “I am in no position to make a donation.”

  “It might help you to see what real suffering is like—for children.”

  “Stratton, be realistic. You yourself have lived a very easy life.”

  “DeVere is stubborn, and so am I. I am going to persuade you, Blake.”

  Blake’s low laugh surprised me. “Do you think we have souls, Stratton?”

  I stalled, shifting my snifter to one side, leaning on the table. I could read people fairly well, but I couldn’t read Blake just then.

  “Immortal souls?” he added.

  My father had hired the most brilliant tutors, essayists, psychologists. He had dismissed Stanford as too easy, although appropriate, so he had seasoned my education with long interludes in Italy and France. Still, it had been years since I had debated the possibility of miracles with a Jesuit surgeon or a nuclear physicist.

  I hesitated to take the question seriously. Like most Americans, I find the big philosophical questions both embarrassing and pointless. There are times, though, I reminded myself—as when someone is dying—when the questions arise naturally.

  “This isn’t just a philosophical question,” I suggested.

  “Stratton, look at me—I’m a lost man.”

  “I suppose I really don’t believe in the soul. But I don’t know.”

  “Well, if I had a soul at one time, I no longer possess one. I’ve used it up, or traded it in. But even so, I’m reasonably happy.”

  I tried to joke. “Surely DeVere hasn’t made a down payment on your eternal life.”

  “I’m not talking about DeVere. I’m talking about the choices I’ve made, step by step, day after day, all my life.”

  “Forgive me for finding this argument just a little bit irritating, Blake.”

  “You’re angry.” He laughed, and I could see a trace of the Blake I had known, the gentle, ironic man. “You know what the problem is, Stratton? You’re likable. I can’t help it. I like you. Everybody who knows you does. And it’s hard to sit here and tell you the truth. There is idealism, Stratton. And then there is naïveté.”

  “I’m not helping my own cause very much, am I?”

  “If people disappoint DeVere, they suffer. If they attack DeVere, one way or another, they pay. That CNN critic isn’t on permanent holiday in Argentina.”

  “Are you telling me that there is danger in crossing DeVere?”

  He smiled, with real affection. “You remind me of what I have given up.” Blake took a pull at his brandy, then set the glass down as though the liquor tasted foul. Blake gazed at the table. There was a drop of brandy on the dark wood now, and the drop glowed and shifted with the firelight, a coin alive. “Do you know what one of your greatest flaws will turn out to be, Stratton?”

  Blake had always had an avuncular familiarity with me, but even so I wasn’t quite ready to hear about my defects.

  He continued, “You are ambitious. You have looks and brains, but you want something more.”

  It seemed that as long as he talked about my character, and avoided trying to warn me, he was more like the man I used to know.

  “What,” I asked, “are you warning me against?”

  “I canceled a meeting,” said Blake. “I was supposed to meet with Peter Renman tomorrow morning in Palm Springs. It was going to be a fantastic deal. I’m selling my art.”

  “You can do that? Live without your art?”

  He did not respond, and I considered what he had just said. “You were going to meet with Peter Renman!”

  “DeVere made the meeting possible.”

  Renman was a name to dwarf even DeVere’s. The man was a Hollywood legend, a force in television, magazine publishing, professional sports, finance. The informed story was that he told presidents what to do, and when, and made sure their favorite liquor was waiting for them in the Renman villa in Palm Springs. If it could be said that DeVere had an empire, then Renman had the world.

  “Renman!” I said, still stunned by the name. My father had known Renman, and Renman had some shadowy relationship with my mother’s past. The great man had come to my father’s funeral. He had been a short, quiet man behind a cordon of hired security.

  “I canceled our meeting,” said Blake. “I’m sick of all of it.”

  “These men can give you everything you want!”

  Blake smiled wearily. “Can they? I think you want these men to be all-powerful because it makes your life simple. To fulfill your dreams, you defeat DeVere. I’m not so sure.

  “Why don’t you come over to my place tomorrow,” he continued. “Breakfast. I want us to talk further about the power DeVere has, and Renman.”

  I saw another chance to win back his friendship, and I accepted. But as we shook hands, I sensed a sadness in Blake, or worse.

  “I’m going to fight DeVere,” I said. “You won’t persuade me otherwise.”

  There was something in the look he gave me that startled me. I became fully aware of an undercurrent that had been present throughout our conversation.

  “What is it, Blake? What’s wrong?”

  “Maybe I’m awake, after sleeping all these years. But just recently—very recently—everything is different for me.”

  Words occurred to me, but I did not utter them: Blake was disillusioned. He was depressed. Such emotional shifts were not unusual in thoughtful people. But at the same time I experienced a powerful anxiety. I could not leave Blake alone. Blake was more than a changed man. He was a broken man, a sick individual.

  He seemed to read my thoughts. His smile was forced. “I’m fine,” he said. “Too late wise—but perfectly all right.”

  The warning repeated itself in me. Don’t go.

  Don’t leave Blake alone.

  8

  It is only afterward that we are aware of certain things. Only after the music has ended are we aware of how greatly it moved us, and only after a conversation has ended do we realize how strongly it has changed our sense of things.

  My own family history has made me wary of the psyche’s weather. People are not constant landscapes, paintings that age relatively unaltered from new to dusky to the point that they must be cleaned.

  Blake was in trouble. He needed my help.

  As I slipped into the cab that carried me from the club I was aware of a sensation that I did not quite understand. There was something in my jacket pocket, over my heart.

  I had to smile. It bent with my movements, and as I stepped from the cab outside my home I felt it there, a wire, a fluted shaft of bone, but not dead, something else, something nearly alive.

  When I was upstairs, in my office, the room with its clutter of pencils, T-squares and flat files, I hurried into my bedroom and pulled the big old Milton from the shelf. This large, calfskin-sheathed volume had been used by Rick and myself to press clover and coltsfoot blossoms. Certain passages of “P
aradise Regained” were still stained with chlorophyll. I had learned to regret my youthful carelessness, but now the phrase “subtle thief of youth” was concave with the old imprint of a milkweed flower.

  I sat on the bed with the book open on my lap. The treasure fluttered from my hand when I withdrew it from my inner pocket, and spun in the air. Silently, it fell to the bed. For some reason, I found it almost too beautiful to look at directly, like sunlight off crystal.

  An azure plume. Or was it white? I couldn’t tell. The eye prized the sight of this feather as it prized nothing else in the world. Surely it was white, perfect, steel and ice and quicksilver in a glance. I closed the book, pressing it around the light.

  Nona’s voice was on the answering machine, with bad news. She was coming, but she did not know when. “Tonight, I think. But, at the rate things are going, maybe a year from tonight.”

  That afternoon, I called Fern. He lived in a duplex in the Sunset District with a potted ficus and a VCR, and he answered the phone in the middle of the first ring. Fern was one of those men who use a laconic, vigorous manner to protect them from intimacy. I suggested that he drop by Blake’s house, not for a visit, just a check.

  “A check,” said Fern.

  “Make sure …” What? I had nothing but an uneasy hunch. “Make sure no one is after him.”

  He didn’t respond. He was plainly waiting for the sort of anecdote he knew too well: homicidal fan, or someone bent on blackmail.

  “What makes you think someone’s after him?”

  Intuition was something that Fern would trust. But when it came to bothering someone like Blake Howard, Fern would scoff at anything so nebulous as my feelings of anxiety. To think too much is to make mistakes. “I think someone wants to do Blake harm.”

  I was relieved when Fern said, “Okay.” Meaning: I know all about harm.

  “Just make sure he’s home.”

  “And?”

  “Don’t disturb him.”

  Fern gave me a couple of ticks of silence, allowing me to see that I had stung his pride just a bit. “He won’t know I’m there.”

  “The fact is,” I said, trading a bit of confidence to soothe Fern’s pride, “I think the trouble may be in his mind.”

  I had meant this to sound lighthearted, cheering. But as I hung up the phone I knew that the mind can be an assassin.

  And I realized that I might be simply projecting my own anger with Blake onto the vague, shifting darkness of the City.

  I was angry with Blake, that was true. But not so angry I wanted him to be hurt.

  I reassured myself: I was not angry at all, really.

  He was an old friend.

  I adjusted the crook-neck lamp over my drafting table, and touched the pencil to the sketch of a roof garden, a drawing much like the one I had entered into the Golden Gate Park competition.

  Collie tapped on the doorjamb with the back of her fingernails, a tap-tap-tap I would not have heard if I had not known it, and recognized it, as one of the subtle, dependable sounds of my life.

  “Going to go,” whispered Collie, cautious about disturbing me.

  “Thanks, Collie. I know the house is a wreck. It looks like something blew up in the sun room. We live in a construction yard. I know how hard it is.”

  “No, sir, it’s quite all right,” said Collie.

  The contractor was a good person, who hired brilliant people, students at the Arts School. There were more reliable, and more boring, contractors, but I knew that by supporting Packard I was supporting, indirectly, the arts. The trouble was that I was, for the moment, out of money, and I had asked Packard to delay for awhile. He had been mystified, but I told him that I wanted to sketch the walls in their stripped state.

  “I did make some extra sandwiches,” she said in a very low voice, virtually a whisper. It was the tone she nearly always used in my studio.

  “I expect Nona tonight. She wasn’t sure when. Apparently there was a strike in Chicago, and air traffic is a mess everywhere.”

  Collie was a tall woman with gray-blue hair. She was the last of my family’s servants from the old days, the halcyon days before my mother tried to harm the staff. Collie had been in the London blitz. She had always fascinated me as a boy, saying words in a way I thought unique to her: gair-idge. “I had to take my car to the gair-idge.”

  A buzz bomb had landed in her back garden, a dud. Now she stayed with an elderly sister in Daly City, a woman who, ever since a fall down her front steps, was afraid to live alone. Collie’s quiet courtesy did not make her seem meek. It made her, quite the contrary, seem stately and careful. “I know this place will look as lovely as all the others,” she said, switching from a whisper to a beautiful alto. “All your work turns out so lovely.”

  When she was gone, I wished she had stayed on for a few minutes. I like to be around people like Collie, people with experience and deep feelings, and I sometimes find myself wearing solitude like borrowed, confining clothing. I adjusted the drafting table. The pencil made a satisfying whisper on the paper. The paper was the watermarked laid I bought by the kilo in Paris, and the hard-lead pencil soon lost its fine point as I roughed-in a sheaf of what I imagined would be asters, purple asters when I touched them up with watercolor.

  Fern called just as I replaced the receiver. “There’s a light in the house, upstairs, and another one on in what looks like the bathroom.”

  “So he’s home.”

  “Someone is.”

  “That’s fine,” I said. “That’s all I really need to know.”

  “He’s burning something in the fireplace.”

  “That’s what fireplaces are for.”

  “Paper.”

  I knew as well as Fern that newsprint and old letters smell different from applewood.

  I called Blake, and there was no answer.

  There was something wrong. I drew for awhile to give myself something to think about.

  At last I threw down the pencil impatiently. I pushed redial again. No one answered. Now I was more worried than ever.

  I nearly called my brother, Rick. My younger brother and I had a friendly but distant relationship, one that allowed him from time to time to call me to complain about alimony or his latest mechanic’s bill, and it allowed me to hear someone lively, someone who reminded me of my father, if only in the timbre of his voice, his chuckle, and our shared memories.

  I pushed redial again, persistent, faithful. Blake had always engaged a housekeeper. Surely he had a secretary. Nobody’s phone simply rang and rang anymore. Something else always happened, a person or a machine took over to record your message.

  I put down the phone and tilted my head, listening.

  I wonder what it was that made me sense that the house was no longer empty. Collie must have slipped back, I told myself, remembering her sweater, or, as she would put it, her “jumper.” Or Nona—surely it was Nona—dropping by on the way back from the airport.

  There was someone in the house.

  Someone downstairs.

  I stood, and the chair I had designed behaved as it was intended to, scooting on its silent rollers, rebounding soundlessly off the wall. Nona called it my mosquito chair because it floated so lightly.

  How transparent a voice sounds when it is trying to sound confident against the dark. I called for Collie, and then for Nona. My shadow fell before me. Floors were solid redwood from the Russian River, except for the study, which was floored in koa wood from Hawaii.

  There was no question. I was not alone in this house.

  I stood at the top of the stairs, in the bad light, then, slowly, sliding one hand along the almost imperceptible dust of the banister, began to make my way down. The stairs were one part of the house that did not creak. Some craftsman in the 1880s had determined that this would be the masterpiece of stairways, wooden pegs so tight-fitted they did not give, except for that very slight flex that all wood has, that property that keeps it from breaking.

  It was not a person.
It was a creature of some sort. There was the sound again. A fluttering, a big lift and fall, something flying. It was the sound of a bird, very big. Not like one of the African grays my cousin had kept in Santa Barbara. This was a very large winged creature, feathered and strong, fluttering with a noise like a sail loose in the breeze.

  Christ, I thought. There’s a bird caught somewhere downstairs.

  And not just a bird. It’s a condor, at least. My mind went blank, canceled by the single thought: the feather.

  I took each step slowly, expectantly, descending into the dark vault of my home.

  9

  The light wouldn’t go on in the first room I tried. The light switch in the next room worked, but only a carpenter’s lamp flashed on, a shape like a helmet full of light. Furniture loomed under plastic, the plastic glazed with plaster dust.

  I flinched. The rustling of the wings receded before me, a coy presence.

  There is an instinctive sense of size, of girth, of the heft and presence of a large, living creature. That’s what I felt now. There was a creature my size, or slightly smaller, in my house.

  Not every room was being remodeled, not every room was stripped to its ribs. But now every room I entered, in the poor light, was one under repairs, dusty, shrouded. I did not want to speak out loud. It’s terrible when that happens—when the sound of one’s own voice fills a room, puny and unreal. “Show me where you are,” I said, my voice sounding thin.

  Was there a gap in my sense of time? There seemed to be. When I was aware of myself, and the walls around me, the sound of the wings was gone.

  There was nothing.

  I laughed, a sound that made the silence of the place all the worse. So, you see, I told myself. Everything is fine. No need to worry.

  I experimented mentally with a phrase: auditory hallucinations. I reasoned with myself. I could be suffering a delusion of some sort. But why did I feel so wide-awake, so keen?